The manuscript of Alma Mahler's Diaries, a pile of old exercise books, lay unread and seemingly illegible in the library of an American university. In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them - and found what he was looking for. But he also found more than he had expected. The Diaries depict in intimate detail the four years during which Alma grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Gustav Klimt, they break off shortly before her marriage to Gustav Mahler. Beaumont felt that reading the diaries was like raising a curtain on the Vienna of 1900 to reveal the vitality of everyday life, eye-witness accounts of significant artistic events and insights into the behavioural patterns and linguistic conventions of the time and culture.